Craig Timberg of the Washington Post had an article in yesterday’s edition of the paper in which he reports that there may be a more effective approach to preventing pediatric AIDS cases in Africa than giving antiretroviral drugs to pregnant women: birth control.
Timberg’s article ('Best Kept Secret' for HIV-Free Africa) is based on the work of Family Health International, a nonprofit organization headquartered in North Carolina. Timberg reports that:
The group has found that programs providing antiretroviral drugs to pregnant women prevented 101,000 cases of pediatric HIV between 1999 and 2006. Contraception, meanwhile, averts the births of 173,000 infected babies each year, the group says.
Improving birth control availability in Africa, where usage rates are the lowest in the world, could prevent tens of thousands of more infections more reliably and less expensively than antiretroviral drugs, Cates said. Surveys among women who know they have HIV show most do not want to become pregnant again because they fear infecting their babies and leaving even healthy offspring as orphans.
Timberg goes on to report that:
Yet as research has mounted about the importance of contraception in controlling pediatric HIV, U.S. and other international funding for birth control programs has declined. The budget President Bush has proposed for this year is less than one-third the amount spent in 1995, when adjusted for inflation, according to statistics compiled by Washington-based Population Action International, which lobbies for better family planning programs worldwide.
The shift has contributed to the stagnation of contraceptive access in some areas and outright declines in western Kenya, where programs funded by international donors once helped women resist strong cultural pressure to have many children. Women here say they have little choice other than to risk giving birth to children doomed to develop AIDS.
Later in the article, he notes:
Surveys conducted in recent years have shown significant shortages of contraceptives and the capacity to deliver them safely across Kenya. Birthrates are rising again, and the United Nations has nearly doubled its long-term projections for Kenya's population, from 44 million to 83 million by 2050.
Timberg's article comes on the heels of the Fifth African Population Conference held last week in Tanzania. The conference, which attracted several hundred delegates, put renewed attention on the links between family planning, reproductive health, and attainment of the Millennium Development Goals. Press reports indicated that Benson Morah, from the United Nations population agency, told the group that, "Population is becoming a 'missing priority area' in national and regional dialogues, poverty reduction efforts and attainment of MDGS."
Africa has a total fertility rate of 5.1, the highest in the world according to the African Population Report 2006. Africa has less than a billion people, but its population, despite high mortality rates, is projected to reach 1.4 billion by 2025.
